Germany’s best architectural building is in the Bavarian capital. The office building Werk 12, located in the modern Werksviertel-Mitte district, is the winner of the prestigious German Museum of Architecture (DAM) Award 2021.
The Werk 12 building, which opened at the end of 2019, was a joint design by the Dutch architectural bureau MVRDV and the German bureau N-V-O Nuyken von Oefele Architekten. Its main feature is an unusual glass facade decorated with huge five-meter letters (such as AAHHH, WOW, PUH and others), resembling exclamations from comic books.
Werk 12, which cost 40 million euros to build, houses offices, a café and a three-storey fitness club. According to the jury, the 3.25-meter-wide outdoor terraces and cascading staircases around the perimeter of the building are a perfect invitation to be outdoors – just what you need in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic. “A revival of an industrial past that celebrates the future,” is how the architects themselves described their new facility. “We wanted to build a building that would be modern but also fit perfectly into the historical context of the area,” say the authors of the building, which is located on the site of a former industrial zone.
The German Architectural Museum Frankfurt Award (DAM) has been presented annually since 2007 to the most outstanding architectural projects in Germany.
District of the future
The Werk 12 building is located near Munich Eastern Station in the youth hangout district of Werksfirtel-Mitte. After World War II, the area belonged to the Pfanni factory, a producer of potato-based semi-finished products. In the early 2000s, the company was bought by the British-Dutch Unilever group and its production is now in northern Germany.
The 39-hectare territory of the former industrial zone has become an object of urbanistic experiments. Cafes, restaurants, galleries, concerts, and exhibitions are rapidly opening here. The area is also actively being developed – according to a project by the architectural bureau N-V-O Nuyken a former potato storehouse has also been redesigned to house a concert venue. In addition, more than a thousand new apartments will be built in Werksviertel-Mitte in the coming years, and the entire infrastructure will create more than 7,000 new jobs.